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Impact of Body Dryer Features on Willingness and Perceived Comfort

University of British Columbia. Campus and Community Planning

Acknowledging the negative effects of wet days exacerbated by climate change and drawing inspiration from water amusement parks, this study aims to examine a novel drying method, the body dryer, and specifically how its hygiene and privacy features affect people’s willingness to use and perceived comfort. Regarding this question, we hypothesized that people would show higher levels of willingness and perceived comfort to use the body dryer with hygiene features, as compared to the body dryer with privacy features and the standardized body dryer (control condition) without hygiene or privacy features. A total of 211 participants were randomly assigned to one of the three conditions: control condition, hygiene condition, or privacy condition. They were first asked to view a description and an image of the assigned body dryer, then rate their willingness to use and perceived comfort on scales. Results indicated that the features of body dryers, either hygiene or privacy, had no significant impact on people’s willingness to use and perceived comfort. Despite these results being insignificant, this study contributes to the existing literature by proposing and assessing a novel solution that can help UBC community become more climate resilient in the face of climate change. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”

Report

eng

2023-09-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85843

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/